TCU is Aimless, and Sonny Dykes is Answerless
After the TCU Horned Frogs fell to Houston 30–19 on Friday–their third loss in four games, each more embarrassing than the last–the question hanging over the program was obvious: Where do they go from here?
The answer was also obvious. It has been for most of the last year and a half under head coach Sonny Dykes: they’re going nowhere.
The Frogs are 8–10 since the start of the 2023 season. They’re 9–12 overall since their miraculous 12–0 start in 2022, the first with Dykes at the helm. They’ve been vaporized by vastly more athletic or better coached teams like Georgia, Oklahoma, and Kansas State. They’ve let winnable games against peers like Texas Tech and West Virginia slip away thanks to crushing mistakes in high-leverage situations. And they’ve been exposed by teams like Colorado and the Cougars, who overcame major talent deficits to deal the Frogs debilitating defeats.
All those losses have made it abundantly clear Dykes and his staff have no defining strengths to rely on, and no clear plan for how to develop any.
“I’m at a loss for words … I don’t really have an answer for why we played the way we did,” Dykes said after the Houston loss.
That’s a key difference between Dykes and his predecessor at TCU, Gary Patterson. Patterson always had answers. Those answers weren’t always right, but he always believed they were.
Under Patterson, TCU’s identity was carved in stone for two decades. It was unchanging and immovable, to Patterson’s credit and his downfall. He was committed to his aggressive defensive philosophy, developing undervalued high school recruits, and an old-school, high-control program culture. Those features remained constant, even as the sport changed around him. The rising winds of player autonomy put cracks in the facade and eroded the effectiveness of those defining traits, but the program kept an obvious, distinct shape.
Under Dykes, TCU seems to be made of mist. Shapeless, featureless, with nothing solid to grab onto. What are they trying to accomplish? What are they tangibly, verifiably good at?
Dykes was hired in part for his offensive acumen. The Frogs have certainly piled up plenty of points and yards during his tenure, but they’re often doing so while they try to climb out of deficits directly resulting from turnovers, three-and-outs, and red zone ineptitude. Then in key moments in close games, when the offense absolutely has to deliver, it disappears.
His willingness to utilize the transfer portal and embrace name, image, and likeness (NIL) opportunities for his players at SMU made TCU believe Dykes could use those strategies to raise the overall level of talent on TCU’s roster. But although the Frogs rank first in the Big 12 in the 247Sports Talent Composite, their advantage is not so pronounced that it can compensate for their other deficiencies. That ranking is mostly built on transfers Dykes has acquired from other programs anyway. You can count on one hand the number of high school recruits he has signed at TCU who have made significant contributions in Fort Worth.
His defenses have been uniformly atrocious across two different coordinators. His teams aren’t well prepared, disciplined, or detail-oriented; they start slow every week while notching boneheaded penalties and failing spectacularly in situational football. They’re not physically or mentally tough, getting pushed around on both sides of the line of scrimmage and routinely wilting amid adversity.
You don’t have to be great at everything. But you’ve got to be demonstrably good at something. You need to have a trademark to build upon. If you don’t, how do you build anything?
That’s the issue, ultimately: with every questionable staff hire, every blue-chip recruit who transfers after barely seeing the field, every baffling loss as a home favorite, Dykes reinforces the conclusion that he’s not a builder. He’s not the coach to develop a winning staff, roster, or program culture. Not from scratch.
In 2022, on his way to a College Football Playoff berth and a semifinal win over Michigan, Dykes did a remarkable job taking over leadership of a roster largely built by someone else, giving veteran players freedom to do what they already did well. But when tasked with building a program of his own after losing most of his impact players to the NFL and his offensive play caller to Clemson, he hasn’t been able to establish any discernible identity.
“We just have to figure out, when we get to the game, how to play better and coach better,” Dykes said. “Because, again, it’s all of us.”
Credit Dykes for his honesty. Many head coaches wouldn’t be so willing to admit they don’t have all the answers. But in the end, having the answers–or at least a clear plan to find them–is on the head coach. He shouldn’t still be trying to figure them out nearly three years in.
If he is, it’s time to see if someone else has better answers. Or any at all.
